“You slept badly last night Did you hear anything?”
“I—I——-I heard the clock strike the hours.”
“I heard it strike three, but lay so locked in drowsiness that I knew not the Lord was calling to me. If the Seven Sleepers were melted into one, I would outsleep that one. Well, to get on, I was robbed in the night. It must have been at that hour, for I remember dimly some sort of disturbance. But Providence stood my friend. By the merest chance, it might seem, but not by chance as I believe, I saw the creature make for Broughton. ‘So, here’s for Broughton,’ cried I, ‘on the bare back of Bruce, and see if my good pistols would win back what had been stolen from me.’ The Broughton road it was, and the pistols did the business.” Saying this, he whisked from his pocket the King’s commission, waving it triumphantly aloft. Her wide eyes drank in the amazing sight of it, slowly brimming with superstitious fear, and then she asked a duplicate of the question that had been asked of her a few hours before.
“Did you kill Cromwell?”
“Cromwell! I never saw him.”
“From whom, then, did you wrench that parchment?”
“From the thief, of course. He never reached Cromwell.”
“Oh, I am going mad! Who is the thief, who is the thief?”
“De Courcy, if you must know. Why does this trivial matter so disturb you? De Courcy followed us from Oxford last night, and was lodged at our inn. By some means he penetrated into my room, stole this from me, and I never missed it until I saw him ride for Broughton, and not even then, to tell the exact truth. But I remembered that he had seen me place this paper in the inside pocket of my vest, in the King’s own presence, and then the whole plot came to me. Before he saw Broughton, Bruce and I were down upon him like a Highland storm on the Lowlands. ‘My sword! you should have seen us! For a minute there was one whirligig of horse’s legs and Frenchman, like a raree-show of acrobats struck by a whirlwind. If I had not been so angry I would have had the best laugh of my life,”—and the genial William threw back his head and made the wood echo with his merriment at the recollection. But the girl was sober enough.
“This is not the King’s commission,” she said quickly.